The Oslo Opera House, which was designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta and completed in 2008, features a 1,370-seat main theater, shown, as well as a 440-seat performance space, and a 190-seat black box theater.

Photo: Nicolas Buisson

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Completed in 2010, Zaha Hadid’s futuristic Guangzhou Opera House comprises two buildings. The larger, sheathed in black granite, contains the primary theater, while a smaller, clad in complementary white stone, is a multiuse hall. Describing their faceted forms, Site and Sound author Victoria Newhouse writes: “The architect conceived the two structures as twin boulders from the nearby river, but in reality the complex is more evocative of spaceships or stealth bombers.”

Photo: Iwan Baan

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The opera house’s acoustics are enhanced by half-inch scoops in the fiberglass-reinforced gypsum walls; dotting the undulating ceiling are 4,000 twinkling LED lights.

Photo: Iwan Baan

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Snøhetta's avant-garde building rises steeply from the adjacent fjord. Its sloping roof doubles as a promenade and appears, as Newhouse notes, “to extend to infinity due to the absence of visible rails or balustrades.”

Photo: Christopher Hagelund/Birdseyepix.com

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Everything about the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas is unconventional, Newhouse observes. A collaboration between architects Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX and Rem Koolhaas of OMA, the 2009 building features an auditorium wrapped in sound-diffusing glass curtain walls, exposing it to the exterior. This innovative scheme was made possible by stacking the office, rehearsal, and support spaces, which typically border a stage, on the ten floors above.

Photo: Timothy Hursley

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A view of the Wyly’s interior, where raised blinds reveal the city beyond. “The Wyly expands the kind of workable modular theater that architects have been trying for since the first part of the 20th century,” Newhouse writes.

Photo: Iwan Baan

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Designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 2011, Miami Beach, Florida’s New World Center—home to the celebrated New World Symphony—has a striking 50-foot-high concert hall with swooping wall panels for video and adjustable seating configurations, which ensure that no seat is more than 13 rows from the stage. The space produces acoustics Newhouse describes as “clear and enveloping no matter what size group is performing.”

Photo: Iwan Baan

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One of the New World Center’s extraordinary features is an exterior projection wall, which, much to the delight of picnicking music lovers outside, allows for simulcasts of performances.

Photo: Iwan Baan

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Clad in an eye-catching royal-blue fiberglass mesh, Jean Nouvel’s Danish Radio Concert Hall, built in 2009, ascends prominently in Ørestad North, a developing area outside Copenhagen’s city center. “This is architecture that is full of surprises,” writes Newhouse, referring to the moving imagery that, come nightfall, is projected on the hall’s exterior and interior.